Review in Psychology Research September 2013, Volume 2, Issue 3, PP.47-52
Chinese College Students’ Internal Structure of Autonomy in English Learning Yuanqi Song1, Wei Fan1, Xiaofu Pan2# 1. Faculty of Education, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China 2. School of Culture and Social Development Studies, Southwest University, Chongqing, 400715, China #Email: smilepxf@126.com
Abstract Based on the studies of learner autonomy both at home and abroad, the researchers constructed the theory around the internal structure of learner autonomy of Chinese college students, and compiled a questionnaire according to the theory. Thereafter, a piloting test and a formal test were carried out among 739 students. Methods of Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were used to analyze the data gathered. The main finding is that there are 3 internal structural elements in college students’ English autonomy including the will of autonomy, the strategies of autonomy and the frequency of autonomy. Keywords: Autonomy; Internal Structural Components; Exploratory Factor Analysis; Confirmatory Factor Analysis
1 INTRODUCTION College English, a very important curriculum in China, is a compulsory course for most of the non-English majors, and has been received much attention and reformed for several times. College English Curricular Requirement issued by Chinese Ministry of Education in 2007 states the main purpose of College English teaching reform that prescribes “The aim of College English… through the reform of teaching concept, content and methods of teachers’, through the improvement of the means of teaching, through the perfection of evaluation system … to establish a teaching and learning model that focuses on students’ autonomy learning ability”. (Higher Education Department, 2007) And it also declares that one way to assess the effectiveness of the reform is to examine how the learners’ learning style has changed and how much their ability of autonomy learning has improved (ibd). Therefore, the cultivation of Chinese English learners’ autonomy becomes a priority and challenge of foreign language teachers. Hole (1981) is the first to define autonomy as “an ability to be responsible for one’s own learning”. This ability demonstrates itself in the learners determining the following items: learning objectives, content, choice of methods, monitoring of learning process and evaluation of learning. Little (1991) claimed that autonomy is an independent ability to think critically and to determine something and to implement it by himself. Chinese scholars have also expressed their thoughts about autonomy. PANG Guowei (2001) concluded the conditions of autonomy as Four Learning “to want to learn, to be able to learn, to be capable of learning and to be persistent to learn”. SHU Dingfang (2004) stated that there are three main components of foreign language learning: attitudes, ability and environment. Attitudes refer to learners’ positive attitude towards learning. Ability refers to learners’ learning skills and tactics. And environment indicates the opportunities given to learners to exercise his duty to learn. ZHANG Fangling (2011) indicated that autonomy, at first, an ability to arrange one’s learning, runs through the whole learning. And its specific features are that learners can set goals, make plans beforehand and manage their learning activities, and they can control and monitor their learning consciously,, and as well self evaluate their learning and better it. As it is, scholars of all schools have discussed autonomy from different aspects. However, issues as what are the internal structural components of autonomy in English learning, how to confirm them and what are the characteristics of College English Autonomy are still to be studied. Based on the cognitive psychology’s theory of “constructivism”, this study holds that learning is not a simple process of teacher passing knowledge to students, but the students construct their own knowledge actively through - 47 www.ivypub.org/RPR
their prior knowledge. And this study also assumes that autonomy mainly includes three essential components: the will of autonomy, the strategies of autonomy and the frequency of autonomy (WA, SA, and FA respectively thereafter in this article). On the basis of these ideas, this study applies the methods of quantitative investigation and factor analysis to study the internal structural components of Autonomy in College English learning.
2 RESEARCH METHODS 2.1. Research Subjects In this study, 800 questionnaires were given out to the college students of two universities in Southwest China, and 739 are valid. As for the accuracy of the study and convenience of the subjects, the questionnaires are written in Chinese. There are 350 valid questionnaires in the piloting research (For the convenience, this pilot questionnaire is carried out online all in one grade in one university). In this study, there are 37.4% of male students, and 59.6% of female students answered the questionnaire. 3% of the attendants failed to provide this information. 54% of them are students of the Arts, and the rest are students of the Sciences. And there are 389 valid questionnaires formal study. And they are chosen from two grades in the two universities randomly. In the final study, there are 26% of male students, 62.1% of female students answered the questionnaire. 11.9% of the attendants prefer not to provide this information. 34.5% of them are students of the Arts, and 49% of them are students of the Sciences, and still 16.5% of them from schools of technology. 55% of the attendants are freshmen, and 45% of them are in the second grade.
2.2. Research Tools The questionnaire College Students’ Autonomy Questionnaire in English Learning used in this study is compiled by the authors based on the assumption that there are mainly three essential components: WA, SA and FA. Based on the analysis of the connotations of these components, 27 questions are compiled, each of which is a statement, followed by 5 degree choices: “totally disagree (1), disagree (2), uncertain (3), agree (3) and totally agree (5)”. After the analysis of the piloting study, those items with a low factor value loading and dispersed characters are deleted, and there are only 18 questions in the final study. Tested with credibility and liability, this questionnaire conforms with the requirements of statistics, which is a valid and liable questionnaire.
2.3. Study process First of all, a theoretical assumption about College English Autonomy’s three essential components of WA, SA and FA is constructed. The next step is to compile a piloting questionnaire, followed by the implementation of the piloting study, analyzing the outcome through exploratory factor analysis to obtain a preliminary valid questionnaire. Then, the analysis of Confirmatory Factor Analysis is carried out, and a formal, valid and liable questionnaire is obtained in this way. Finally, the internal structural components are studied through the analysis of the data obtained.
3 OUTCOME AND ANALYSIS After the data have been obtained, two methods were applied to analyze them so as to confirm weather the theoretical assumption is correct or not.
3.3 Exploratory Factor Analysis of the Internal Structural Elements of College Students English Autonomy 350 students from one college in southwest of China chosen randomly answered the 27 questions in the pilot study questionnaire. The data were analyzed with SPSS in the aspect of Factor Analysis. And here is the result. Data from table 1 show that the three internal structural components have a relative great value in their questions respectively (all above 0.4), and the total contribution is great. It is 62.03%, that is to say, it can elaborate 62.03% of the whole variation. As a result, it can be concluded from this study that college students’ autonomy in English learning is composed of the three essential components: WA, SA and FA. - 48 www.ivypub.org/RPR
TABLE 1 FACTOR ANALYSIS OF THE COLLEGE STUDENTS’ ENGLISH AUTONOMY
F1 .852 .837 .833 .826 .797 .782 .763 .700
Component F2 F3
A24 I have spent a lot of efforts in learning English. A22 In average, I spent at least 2 hours in learning English every day. A23 I preview the text, including the new vocabularies. A25 I often ask myself whether I have finished my English learning tasks. A27 I often make use of the net and reference books to look for the materials I am interested in. A26 I will think of giving up when I am reading a difficult passage. A20 I have my own methods of learning English. A17 I will leave several hours to learn English every week. A8 I always apply learning tools to solve problems in my English learning. .771 A11 I know the methods to look for the materials I am interested in through the net and reference books. .710 A10 I will rewrite my own notes in learning so as to help memorizing the knowledge. .677 A12 I will manage to learn English every day no matter how busy I am. .655 A9 I always use the net to search for the English learning materials. .489 A2 I think that the materials provided by the university is very useful. .433 A3 I think that the key to learn English well is to stick to the learning. .758 A5 I think that the improvement of English proficiency lies mainly in one’s active learning. .748 A4 I believe that the learning of English depends mainly on the mastery of good methods. .649 A1 I believe that English learning is mainly autonomy. .516 Factors FA SA WA Value of features 5.78 3.21 2.17 Contribution 32.12% 17.84% 12.07%
3.2 Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Internal Structural Components TABLE 2 FITTING DEGREE OF THE CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS OF THE INTERNAL STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS
χ2 444.06
df 132
χ2/df 3.36
RFI 0.81
NFI 0.84
NNFI 0.86
CFI 0.88
IFI 0.88
RMSEA 0.078
FIG 1 MODEL OF THE INTERNAL STRUCTURAL COMPONENTS OF AUTONOMY IN COLLEGE ENGLISH LEARNING - 49 www.ivypub.org/RPR
LISREL 8.0 is applied to the Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the internal structural components with the main purpose of investigating its fitting degree. LISREL provides a systemic approach to analyze and study data, and allows researchers to evaluate the measurement and structural parts (the cause and result relationship) at the same time. Fitting degree refers to the degree of conformity of the structural part and the actual measurements. The fitting degree of this study is shown in Table 2, and its structural fitting model is shown in Figure 1. It is generally believed that if the value of χ2 /df is small, the fitting degree of the model is good. The fitting degree in this study is acceptably good. If the value of the fitting degree index of RFI, NFI, NNFI, CFI, IFI approaches 1, and RMSEA is smaller than 0.08, the theoretic assumption of the study is better. The values of RFI, NFI, NNFI, CFI, IFI are all above 0.80; and RMSEA (=0.078) is lower than 0.08 in this study. This demonstrates that the fitting degree of the three factors is good. On the other hand, the structural validity of the questionnaire is also proved by the conformity of the theoretical model and the measured model shown in Figure 1. The 18 questions cover the three internal structural components of the autonomy in College English Learning: WA, SA and FA.
4 DISCUSSION The study of autonomy in College English Learning in China has been carried out for more than 20 years since 1990s. Scholars have studied autonomy consciousness (HE, 2012; SU, 2012; ZU, 2009), autonomy strategies (NI, 2010; CHEN, 2009) and autonomy atmosphere (NING, 2006; CHEN, 2005; XIN, 2002) and so on. Their focus is shifted from the pure theoretical discussion to the quantitative research, but the main part still remains to study “from the aspect of teaching, to discuss how teachers should cultivate students’ autonomy consciousness and ability, how universities should improve the learning environment for the students” (GAO, 2006). John Tagg (2003) believed that students are the main part in college teaching and learning, and colleges should change themselves from “Instruction” colleges to “Learning” colleges. In order to achieve this, not only the colleges should change in the fields of administering and instruction so as to pay more attention to students’ learning roles, but also the students should change themselves both in belief and actions to exert their roles in learning. William Littlewood (1999) pointed out that students are responsible for their learning. Learning without students’ active participation is nothing. To be responsible means that students will take up partly or wholly the duties shouldered in the past all by the teachers, such as setting the goals, choosing the materials and monitoring the learning and so on (ibid). Judging from these aspects, this study explores the internal structural components of autonomy in College English Learning totally from the aspect of the learners. Among the three internal structural components, the will of autonomy is the first important one. There will have no activities and outcome of learning without the will to learn. Having the will to learn, one also needs the skills and strategies to learn so as to enhance the efficiency of learning, and this will further promote the degree of will. And the frequency of autonomy is by far the most important one. If there are no frequent learning activities, a learner can not turn the short memory into long memory, or he/she may not transform the surface knowledge into the deep knowledge. In this case, the high will and good strategies can not guarantee the efficiency of learning in the long run. This study shows that the college and teachers not only need to cultivate the students’ autonomy awareness, to teach them a certain learning strategies, and to create a good autonomy environment, but also need to take account of the measures to promote and examine students’ autonomy learning in their curriculum policy making and implementation, to encourage them and to help them develop the abilities to set up their learning goals and to achieve their goals, to make adjustments so as to obtain the desired learning outcome or better. However, in this paper, the relationships among the three components and the classroom teaching or the curriculum design and implementation are excluded, as well as the actual confirmatory analysis between the three components and the real learning effects. All these need further study in the future.
5 CONCLUSION On the basis of autonomy studies both at home and abroad, as well as the second language acquisition studies, this study assumes that college students’ autonomy is composed of the three components: the will of autonomy, the strategies of autonomy and the frequency of autonomy. After the exploratory factor analysis of the data, it is - 50 www.ivypub.org/RPR
discovered that the three components are included in the Chinese college students’ English autonomy learning. Then, the confirmatory factor analysis has been carried out, and it further demonstrates that the college students’ autonomy in English learning is composed of the three internal structural components. Note：This paper is one of the researching results of the Southwest University Project (Item number: 2009JY019).
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Authors 1Yuanqi
2Wei
Song (197102-today), got his BA
Fan, a professor in Faculty of
and MA in Foreign Languages and
Education, Southwest University, China, is
Applied
Southwest
a Ph.D. supervisor in Curriculum and
University in China. He has been working
Pedagogy. She got her Ph.D. in Curriculum
in the College of International Studies in
and Pedagogy in Southwest University.
Southwest University, teaching English for
She teaches courses in Curriculum and
the non-English majors. He had been to
Pedagogy, Chinese Pedagogy, Reform of
study in Australia, American and the Great Britain. He is
the Compulsory Educational and so on to the undergraduates and
currently doing his Doctor Degree in Education, Curriculum and
post graduates. She is also an expert in Primary Chinese
Instruction in Faculty of Education, Southwest University.
education.
Linguistics
in
3Xiaofu
Pan, professor in the School of
Culture and Social Development Studies, Southwest University in China, mainly studies
applied
psychology
and
its
instructions. He is a Ph.D. Supervisor of applied psychology. He received his PhD in Organizational Culture and Managerial Psychology Studies from the Southwest University of China. He teaches
courses
in
organizational
behavior,
managerial
psychology, and psychology of leadership. Dr Pan was a visiting scholar in the School of Psychology at Beijing Normal University. His research is centered on the psychology of management and organizations, and currently is focused on positive
organizational
behavior
within
the
enterprise
organizational context and the school organizational climate.
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